(Press-Register, Bill Starling)The sanctuary of St. Mary's by the Sea Episcopal Church in Coden, Ala., is seen Tuesday, Aug. 18, 2009. The church was destroyed by Hurricane Katrina in 2005 and it was not until Easter Sunday this year that it finally reopened.

CODEN, Ala. -- On a sky-darkening morning, the Rev. John Hicks of St. Mary's By-The-Sea walked by the 1½-ton anchor in front of his Episcopal church, the only immovable object on land swamped by Hurricane Katrina four years ago.

The bearded vicar gazed up at his board-and-batten church, its Gothic-style eaves and tin roof topped by a Celtic cross, with the grateful look of a man receiving answered prayers.

On Aug. 29, 2005, when Katrina pushed nearby Fowl River and Portersville Bay over their banks, St. Mary's was wrecked.

"I thought we'd been spared again until I opened the door," said Hicks of Katrina's impact.

After all, the church which had been destroyed by the 1906 hurricane, then rebuilt and destroyed again by a fire in 1918, had weathered recent decades much better. A 1965 structure, set close to the giant anchor, had endured Hurricanes Camille, Frederick and Ivan.

(Courtesy of John Stringer)St. Mary's By the Sea in Coden, Ala., is seen after Hurricane Katrina destroyed it in 2005. The church had to be demolished and did not reopen until this year.

While other area churches soon reopened their doors -- St. Margaret's Catholic Church in Bayou La Batre welcomed parishioners back inside on Easter Sunday, 2006, said St. Margaret's pastor, the Rev. Bieu Nguyen -- St. Mary's needed much longer. It opened anew on Easter Sunday 2009.

"We had nothing left to rebuild with," Hicks said. "But we had to make sure that disappointment did not give way to fear. We had to understand this was not the end."

Insurance covered only $123,000 of the nearly $1 million needed to rebuild, he said.

In addition to the Episcopal Diocese of the Central Gulf Coast, other religious institutions, far and wide, helped with contributions.

Hicks praised help given from other Episcopal churches from as far away as Bedford, N.Y., and from the Jewish community at Mobile's Springhill Avenue Temple, and the American Jewish Committee in New York.

(Press-Register/Bill Starling)Rev. John Hicks talks to a reporter as he sits in one of the pews at St. Mary's by the Sea Episcopal Church in Coden Tuesday, Aug. 18, 2009.

Plaques inside the foyer of the rebuilt St. Mary's celebrate those contributions, as well as a seven-branch menorah, a replica of the one in the ancient Temple of Jerusalem, which Hicks said he put up to honor the Jewish community.

"I never expected this," said Hicks of the generosity.

He said those contributions from the Jewish community and others serve as a model of "giving," of "selflessness," which is a model for his own parishioners to learn from.

The destruction -- and rebirth -- of the church holds other lessons, too, he said.

"The word 'crisis'," he said, "has its origins in the concepts of both 'danger' and 'opportunity.'"

What Hurricane Katrina provided, he discovered, was a chance to realize that opportunity.

"It reminds us that a church is more than its building. It's the people. And this opportunity gives us a chance to grow."

A native of Mobile, Hicks grew up Catholic, going to McGill-Toolen High, eventually becoming an Episcopalian and graduating from seminaries in Kentucky and Maryland.

Dyslexic as a child, Hicks said, he felt a deep sympathy for special-needs individuals. At age 7, on a bus in Mobile with his mother, he saw a group of deaf congregants from a church signing to each other.

He heard an "inner voice," he said, telling him his life's work was to help people.

Serving a diocese in Chicago, he worked in the Cathedral Shelter, tending to the needs of people on "skid row," the indigent, and those dealing with substance abuse.

Worn out by the cold Chicago winters, he said, he returned south with his wife Patricia and their daughter and two sons, and became vicar at St. Mary's in Coden as well as St. Andrew's Episcopal Church in Mobile.

For many years, he said, he was also an instructor at the former Albert Brewer Developmental Center in Mobile.

In the months following Katrina, though, the stress he felt was unprecedented.

Working 18-hour days, tending to the needs of congregants, "keeping the church together," he said, took its toll on his health.

But he sustained his congregation while also being inspired "by their pride in the church," he said. Church members helped turn an old parish hall into a makeshift chapel while construction was going on.

Inside the new St. Mary's is a heart cypress altar salvaged from Katrina, said in a St. Mary's history to be the altar where Jefferson Davis's daughter, Varina, received the rites of confirmation when the altar stood at Christ Church in Mobile.

There is a giant clam shell used for baptisms, a lectern in the shape of a shrimp boat wheel, and a processional cross in the shape of an anchor.

And, in the airy reaches of the church, the windows looking out to swaying pines, and another Gulf Coast storm season, a sense of serenity -- of calm.

"History here is measured by generations, not by years," Hicks said.

In the future, he said, he believes congregants will look back with admiration, and appreciation, for what the Katrina generation went through in sustaining their church.